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Sunday, February 16, 2014

One of the Biggest Issues on a CV/Resume...

Over the last few months, I have been receiving numerous enquiries from professionals worldwide about having their CV/Resume written.

Typical comments I hear are: ‘I cannot seem to get an interview’, ‘I am struggling to write my CV’, My CV is too long and I don’t know what to leave out’ are just some classics.

It was abundantly clear – 95% of the CV’s had major issues and one of the BIGGEST ISSUES was (and historically has been the same for the past 23 odd years I have been writing CV’s) was cut and paste/ vague wild statements with no real added value as opposed to specific statements. which had results thus adding real value.

So let me help you out by getting into the mind of the company who is reading your CV.

Why should a company select your CV/resume, interview you and possibly hire you, when they may have a few hundred candidates to choose from? What can you say that will make your CV stand out? How can you create the necessary wording in your CV/resume in order to help provide a mental picture for the reader, showing your potential capabilities? How will you be able hold the reader's interest in order for you to get past that first critical step of being short-listed for a possible interview?

Many a time – I have read statements on peoples CV and when I ask the question - "So what?" – I often get a stunned silence.

Below are a couple of (So What’) to get you thinking:

Led a team of engineers - (So what?)

How about this - Led a team a of 10 engineers on a successful project worth £500,000 in upgrading the company's turbine systems which led to an annual company operational savings of £200,000.

How about this - Team leader managing a call centre team of 20 staff and was responsible for a 6 month cycle of process improvements covering the analysis, creation and delivery of a new inbound call centre customer handling process, leading to improved overall customer call answering efficiency by 22% and raised overall customer satisfaction ratings by 10%.

I ask you - which is more interesting and descriptive to read? Which club would you like to be in – the 5% (accepted) or 95% (rejected)?

Remember – Preparation for one (CV), is preparation for the other (Interview).